Clear as Crystal
by Digital Senshi Sailor Who
Summary: What's Dilandau to do when he can't sleep? Pester Folken, of course! Rated for language. Implied shounen ai/slash.


I hate disclaimers, so if you think I own Escaflowne, you're a very silly person. This contains bad language (what more can we expect from Dilandau-sama?), and lots of innuendo. It has implied slashiness, but it's not really slash. Interpret Folken as loving Dilandau like a child or being attracted to him, however you like. I'm evil, aren't I?   
  
Tell me, please, if you find any mistakes in my writing. It's a first draft, after all.  
  
* * *  
  
Every story seems to begin in this or similar a fashion, but it was true, so I will say it: it was a Dark and Stormy Night. Rain is no small matter on the Vione. Up in the air, among the clouds, a little wind and water becomes a maelstrom of epic proportions, a titanic struggle between the human ingenuity that allowed such perilous flight and the elements themselves. Such considerations were not originally taken into account when energists were first harnessed for the purpose of airborne locomotion, and the first ships of the sky suffered a disastrous fate.  
  
Such carnage surely flutters and floats serenely through the mind of my charge tonight: imagine, bodies dashed upon the rocks, the crew shattered down to their bare elements by the unforgiving, grim pillars of condensed sky. Think of the blood that would flow from such irrevocable wounds, down, down with the formation of puddles that a small child might, inevitably, shatter with her bare, defiant feet. Thoughts like that must make Dilandau shiver with anticipation, for he seems to take a macabre, intense pleasure from the very idea of causing human pain and suffering.  
  
That's only the thought of it, however, and when he manages to commit to life the concept, heaven help us all.  
  
My insomnia keeps me up this late as routine, so spending extra time up on the bridge weathering the weather is no difficult matter to accomplish. Some of the crew cannot say the same. Even those on the day-shift are awake and about; it's impossible to try to rest in this condition, for fear of being thrown from one's bed onto the hard, stone floor.  
  
This is, apparently, the indignity that Dilandau Albatou had recently suffered. While I had sympathy enough for him inasmuch as I could tolerate a great deal of complaint from the child, my role as commander of the vessel in a hazardous scenario somehow overruled any priority he previously wielded.  
  
"Folken! Don't ignore me, I'm talking to you, jackass!" His eyes, those irises deceptively rose in hue, burned at me with the force of all the lands decimated by their keeper. I saw Fanelia ablaze in that gaze.  
  
"I was well aware. There's nothing I can do about it." There was a time when I used to put an effort forward to correct his language, mythical and faded in memory; it lasted three days. "Short of binding you down to your bed, I think."  
  
"Leave me out of your kinky fantasies."  
  
He remained unconvinced at my impotence, proving that for all his misbehavior and insults, he considered me on the level of omnipotent. I sighed. "You can only wait for it to end. The gale's beginning to let up; it can't be long. Go back to your room."  
  
"Why? So that I can break an arm getting thrown into the wall again?"  
  
Pointing out that his arm hadn't been broken the first time would result in an argument significantly more petty and meaningless than the current. I ignored him. "I'm going to get something to drink. You are welcome to come along and moan there." My intention was to soothe him into a state of kittenish docility with the aid of his favorite beverage: vino.  
  
The galley would certainly be occupied by scores of men in various states of intoxication (what else, realistically, were they supposed to do?), so I gradually, discreetly veered in the direction of my quarters instead. Dilandau seemed not to notice or care, content to detail every bruise laid upon his delicate, beautiful form by the failings inherent in "my ship."  
  
"My nose could've been broken, you heartless bastard. My perfect face would have been ruined forever, because of your ship."  
  
"Not even a broken nose could ruin a face like yours," I sighed. "You're prettier than most girls I've ever met."  
  
He seemed to take pride in that fact. "I'm better than any girl," he stated flatly. "Better looking, smarter, better...in bed." He grinned wildly, obviously attempting to make me feel uncomfortable out of vindictiveness and for the sheer pleasure of it.  
  
Everyone had heard the rumors, and, frankly, I found the gossip about the Slayers' after-hours "training" all too plausible, though none of my business. "Are you expecting me to verify the veracity of any of those claims?"  
  
As Dilandau prepared to let loose a few words to truly and perpetually disturb me, another fork of lightning tongued the sky and the airship shook, throwing the occupants in various unpleasant directions. I caught the wall as the turbulence continued, my metal arm holding me steady and resolute in a turmoil-stricken existence. Dilandau, though to his credit he'd been avoiding the possibility, hit my chest with a dull thud, and I held the protesting child fast with my good arm.  
  
"Be still. You were the one afraid of breaking your pretty face."  
  
He growled at me, claws digging into my arm like some familiar from different lost children, years ago, and he was still. He was silent. He was calm, though inwardly fuming at my power over his momentum. "I'll break my face if I want to," he declared when the sky followed his suit, disengaging from me with excessive force. "And I'll fucking break yours, too, if you ever touch me like that again."  
  
I chuckled. "You're the only person with the capacity to make me laugh anymore, Dilandau."  
  
"You violating me isn't funny!" He stomped a foot for emphasis, though he was thoroughly unintimidating barefoot and in his night clothes.  
  
"I hardly violated you," I continued to laugh, unsmiling. "Do you want the vino or not?"  
  
"You just want to get me drunk so you can take advantage of me," he announced as he continued to trail beside me. "That's why we're going to your room and not the galley."  
  
"Of course, Dilandau," I monotonously affirmed, the door opening wide to admit us passage. I lit the dim, blue lamp inside. The cabinet across the room held the coveted, sought-after liquid, and I drew it out with a glass, doling him a generous portion. "Take what you came for."  
  
Smile wide and devious, he took the glass and asked, "Bribing me to make me shut up? Oh, you're bad." The vino swirled in the glass to the impatient rhythm of his joints. "Aren't you having any?"  
  
I replaced the cork, making my answer clear. "Drink the whole bottle if you have a mind to, but don't complain about a hangover to me in the morning."  
  
Giggling, he downed the remainder of his glass in one long draught. That boy has mastered the art of inhaling alcoholic beverages. "So generous," he sneered. "Just make sure I'm too drunk to remember when you rape me, or else Jeture only knows what I'll do to you."  
  
"Dilandau, if I had any desire to sleep with you, even consensually, I'd be guilty of a serious breach in taste."  
  
"Likewise. You're old."  
  
That brought a smirk to my lips. The closest I ever come to smiling is when he brings rise to it, anymore. I'm fond of the boy, despite my severity with him. Dilandau, though he would die before admit it, needs to be taken care of, and I have the habit of adopting unwanted strays. "I'm twenty-five."  
  
"Old," he dismissed. "Is that a wrinkle I see? Yes, I believe it is. I bet you're so old you can't even get it up anymore."  
  
"Certainly not because of you," I acknowledged. "You're still a child."  
  
His eyes narrowed, blazing once more, and he clutched his glass more firmly, feline knuckles taut. "I dare you to say that again, Strategos."  
  
I wondered idly which remark upset him more: that I found him utterly unattractive, or that I'd challenged his manhood. "Calm yourself, Dilandau," I chided. "The worst of the storm's blown over. You can go back to bed."  
  
He took it as a challenge, though it was only so in the sense that I was attempting to avert a quarrel with him. "I'm not a baby. I don't need a bed-time. Pour me some more."  
  
Suppressing a slight smile at his brashness, I said, "You have hands, and better ones than mine at that. You can take care of yourself."  
  
"Damn right I can when I'm with a frigid bitch like you," he muttered, filling the glass to the brim. "I bet you're still a virgin, with an attitude like yours. I bet you have to 'take care of yourself' all the time."  
  
"Not all of us have fifteen pretty boys at the disposal of our every whim, Dilandau." To issue so blatant a challenge to him was unwise, but the course of the conversation practically dictated it. I was compelled to say it.  
  
He drank his vino, not replying for a long time, before he said, "That's not really true, you know."  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
"That I order them to fuck me. That I fuck any of them at all. It's not true. They're always stumbling all over themselves, pissing their damn pants to please me normally, can you imagine how boring it would be in bed? I mean, I like being in charge, but up to a point, it's just disgusting."  
  
"I suppose I can't use 'when Dilandau develops morals' as an excuse for putting things off now, can I?"  
  
"I'm serious, asshole," he spat. "You just believed it 'cause you were jealous. Like everyone is."  
  
While it was certainly true that some aboard the Vione were envious of the Dragon Slayers' position and their rumored liaisons with the commander, I could not be counted among them. "Jealous of what?"  
  
He looked miffed, as though I had spurned him. "Like your opinion matters, anyway." He drank. "Can tell by the way you dress that you've got no taste, anyhow."  
  
"You're the most entertaining person I know, Dilandau," I sighed, freeing a rare and exceptionally quirky smile.  
  
"And you're the most confusing I know. You smile at me like that, and you never smile at anyone, and then you deny the fact that you're enamored with me."  
  
The smile disappeared abruptly. "I'm not. You suffer delusions of grandeur."  
  
"Maybe, but at least I'm not in fucking denial about it."  
  
"I think you've had enough to drink," I sighed, dreading the things that would pour from his mouth if he were less inhibited than he is under normal circumstances. More, I feared any of them might resonate with something inside of me, our energies entwining. He was correct that I never smiled but with him, but not out of the kind of love he supposed I held for him. No, not at all. "The storm has quieted, why don't you go to bed?"  
  
"Think I will." Breathing in the final contents of his second glass, he casually collapsed backwards onto my bed. "Down blankets? Oh, aren't you special. Given in to the corruption of power, I see."  
  
"Well, comfortable bedding is one perk of my position," I conceded. Wouldn't he be satisfied to learn that as a prince in Fanelia I'd been subject to the most tortuous and lumpy sleeping conditions imaginable, and that was as classy as it got in the place. "And we all know that comfortable bedding corrupts comfortably."  
  
He held the glass up, gazing through the transparent surface at the murky blue glow clinging to everything, and watched the thin layer of crystal distort his view of the room. "Why do people say something's 'clear as crystal?'" he mused. "It's not that clear at all. But nothing is, I guess."  
  
"No, nothing is. That's how life goes," I agreed, reaching to take the goblet from his hand with my right one.  
  
His hand brushed mine for a fraction of a second too long to be unintentional, and he yielded the glass with a yawn. It crossed my mind that he was attempting a rudimentary sort of seduction. That he believed this would impress me or arouse me showed that he truly was innocent of the exploits the crew credited upon him. He was only a child, trying to gain the attentions of an older boy. That was all. "I'm staying here," he decided aloud, leaving no room for dissent in his tone. "It won't matter to you, because you never sleep anyhow."  
  
With the earlier realization and his general pattern of behavior in mind, this course of action came as no shock. Those grounds alone commanded I refuse to tolerate his conduct, but I knew that Dilandau Albatou did what he wanted, and, honestly, I found his stumbling grope for affection sorrowful and endearing. It was beyond me to guess why he possibly wanted to stay the night with me, to seduce me, for all the hate he seemed to hold during daytime hours. He'd been expecting me to protest as part of his kitten game, so, instead, I simply nodded in acknowledgement and dropped my cloak to the floor. His eyes widened.  
  
"Shit...what are you..."  
  
He had not expected me to give in to his demands, not like that. I'd cheated. This would be a fair solution to an ugly situation that promised only to escalate. Physical love was not the antidote to an unhappy childhood (though he still was a child, in my mind), as I well knew. I lay down heavily beside him, the bed sinking beneath my added weight, and, closing my eyes, I whispered, "Sleep well, Dilandau."  
  
He made no movement for a very long time, until, when he must have supposed I was asleep,he shifted to press us close together in the small bed, his face against my chest. Softly (shyly?), he inhaled our shared breath, savoring the moment. I could feel his body, warm on top of the covers, slip beneath the hideous machine that I wore on one shoulder. That numb arm nearly felt his burning heat in its crook, but that would be impossible, for my nerves did not extend into the cold, unfriendly metal.  
  
I held him close.  
  
Squirming in the suddenness of the embrace, reverting only slightly to the child that I knew, he mumbled into my skin, "You're so crystal clear, Strategos. Clear as shit."  
  
Gentle, afraid to break the spell that had been cast, I laid a Draconian kiss upon his fair hair in silent apology. 


End file.
